Throughout, Burr is easily the most relatable character. Who among us has not watched as a favored colleague rose through the ranks, drawing lucky ticket after lucky ticket, as you also toiled away, but to no reward? In “Right Hand Man,” Burr comes to then-general George Washington to propose a strategy for the war. At this point in history, Burr is a war hero: he fought his way through enemy forces in 1775 to rescue the body of his commander, Richard Montgomery, for which he received a citation for bravery.

Yet in this scene, Washington ignores Burr’s ideas and opinions in favor of young upstart Hamilton, asking him to “close the door on [his] way out.” Burr’s frustration at this deeply unfair dismissal is palpable. Burr is a genius, credentialed beyond belief. But at every point, Hamilton, either consciously or unconsciously, keeps Burr from “the room where it happens,” the place where the decisions are being made. Their eventual last encounter becomes more understandable by the second.

[…]

Burr really has two roles in the show: the omniscient narrator, and himself in the present moment. In the affecting finale, as he recounts the moments that led up to his and Hamilton’s fateful, fatal conflict, Odom’s voice takes on a note of barely disguised panic. As the keeper of the narrative, he knows what is coming yet is powerless to stop it.

Odom has said in interviews that he lets himself be shocked by the ending every night, lets himself believe it can be avoided until it can’t. He is a miraculous actor, one whom you can watch thinking, a rare and impressive skill. As he takes his position in the final duel, his eyes wide with fear, you can feel every inevitable step that led to this. Burr’s last “present-moment” word, as he’s shooting Hamilton, is “Wait!” in a terrifyingly sad recollection of his earlier catchphrase, which was the watchword of his ambitions—now to be dashed.

This leads to his all-too-knowing coda to the duel: “History obliterates—in every picture it paints, it paints me in all my mistakes…Now I’m the villain in your history. I was too young and blind to see—I should have known the world was wide enough for both Hamilton and me.” (That last is something the real Burr actually said before his own death at 80.) Odom weeps as he sings this, both out of regret and out of catharsis for all the pent-up frustration he’s been holding in the entire show.

The latest class of NASA astronauts, recruited in 2013 and already in training, will also be candidates for the first trip to Mars, and for the first time in NASA history, 50 percent of them are female.

The class of is made up of eight recruits in total – Josh Cassada, Victor Glover, Tyler Hague, Christina Hammock, Nicole Aunapu Mann, Anne McClain, Jessica Meir, and Andrew Morgan – selected from a pool of around 6,100 applicants. That’s a fierce 0.0013 percent success rate.

The application process alone took 18 months of rigorous medical and psychological testing, and the recruits are now going through two years of training before they’ll officially join NASA’s 46 currently active astronauts.

But what’s really cool is that they’re the first class to be candidates for the mission to Mars. “If we go to Mars, we’ll be representing our entire species in a place we’ve never been before. To me it’s the highest thing a human being can achieve,” McClain told Ginny Graves in an exclusive interview for Glamour magazine at the end of last year.

That training, as you can imagine, is pretty intense, with the candidates learning how to fly T-38 supersonic jets, practicing walking around underwater in spacesuit that weigh 181 kg (400 pounds), and surviving what’s called the vomit comet, which simulates weightlessness through freefall.

“I would like to humanize the space age
by giving a perspective from a non-astronaut, because I think the
students will look at that and say, ‘This is an ordinary person. This
ordinary person is contributing to history.’”

I’ve been through the process of falling into a new fandom enough times now to begin to notice commonalities. Unlikely to be all that interesting to anyone else, so under a cut.

Stage 0: Blissful ignorance.

Stage 1: Huh. What is that Thing?

Stage 2: Double-huh. There it is again.

Stage 3: There sure seem to be a lot of people I follow who love Thing.

Stage 4: In which I check out Thing. Hey. You know what? Thing really is kinda cool. There’s this little part over here, especially, that I like. At this stage I will probably start occasionally Liking posts by mutuals containing Thing.

Stage 5: That part I liked? I really like it. Really really like it. These other parts are pretty cool, too. This is the point at which some tentative reblogging starts to happen, making this the first point where my affinity becomes generally visible. There might also be occasional IRL mentions of Thing to my friends/family.

Stage 6: Screw it. I love it. I love it all. I start seeking out and reblogging stuff from the Thing tags, or that I’ve come across on Twitter or YouTube or somewhere. I also usually start queueing Thing at this point, rather than just reblogging immediately. There are two parts to why I do that: 1) I’m starting to get worried about annoying non-similarly-obsessed followers with the amount of Thing in their dashes, so I want to space it out via my thrice-a-day queue. (I also typically start trying to consistently tag Thing at this point, figuring it might help me hang onto followers who are willing to stick with me but want help stemming the onslaught.) And 2) as I mentioned in another long narcissistic rumination a while back, I think of my queue as being in part a legacy that will continue to dribble out content in the eventually-certain-but-hopefully-not-yet-super-imminent-but-who-knows event of my death, and I’ve decided that I’m okay with the idea of Thing being in the lottery for Last Thing Evar. Friends/family begin to push back on the amount of Thing. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

Stage 7: Pretty much OOC/Trash of the Thing. While I still might struggle not to overwhelm the non-obsessed, my heart isn’t in it. If you’re Thing-averse, probably best that we part ways now rather than trying to keep a bad relationship alive. I start following people because they’re a compelling source of Thing. I cast around for ways to devote more time to Thing, like making gifsets and writing overlong meta. Friends/family: “Hey, can I tell you this really interesting thing I saw today about–” “No.”

Stage 8: I’ve calmed down somewhat. I will still reblog the occasional Thing content, but let’s be honest; I’ve probably seen and reblogged most of it already. Since I make it a rule to always Like something before reblogging it, and then only to very rarely reblog something a second time if I’ve already Liked it once, there isn’t much Thing left to reblog. Occasional nostalgic Thing reblogs/posts. Friends/family: Thank god.

“What Lin is doing is taking the vernacular of the streets and elevating it to verse. That is what hip-hop is, and that is what iambic pentameter was. Lin is telling the story of the founding of his country in such a way as to make everyone present feel they have a stake in their country. In heightened verse form, Shakespeare told England’s national story to the audience at the Globe, and helped make England England—helped give it its self-consciousness. That is exactly what Lin is doing with ‘Hamilton.’ By telling the story of the founding of the country through the eyes of a bastard, immigrant orphan, told entirely by people of color, he is saying, ‘This is our country. We get to lay claim to it.’”